NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

BEYOND DOUBT the most generally useful building of recreational purpose in any park is a picnic shelter. It is admittedly no trivial task to achieve a desirable and unforced variety in such buildings within the confines of a moderate cost. This is true of other park structures, but it is more apparent of shelters because they are so universally existent in park areas. The almost invariable presence of at least one shelter, and often of several shelters, in every park tends to make us especially and painfully aware of a spiritless monotony of design and execution. Exertion of effort to bring character to a shelter, such as will differentiate it from a thousand and one others, is all too rare; attainment of the objective, without bizarre result, still more rare. The attempt is worth all the creative effort expended; the successful accomplishment is truly worthy of praise.

Because its purpose usually leads to its placement in a very choice location within the park, the shelter finds itself in the very center of a stage with a back drop by the first Old Master. Its role is thus a difficult one, and is ill-played if rendered in the flippant slang or thin syncopated measures of the moment. Slapstick comedy technique is inappropriate; some dignity beyond passing fad or fashion is demanded of the shelter's stellar part.

The chief essential of a picnic shelter is overhead protection from sun and rain. Fixed or mobile benches, table and bench combinations, and fireplaces are the bare needs in the way of accessory equipment for the picnic shelter. In size, it ranges from a structure very small and simple, in a minor rendering, to the large, complex, and ambitious combination building with many extra-functional dependencies, encountered in the heavily used park.

When its development is such that it may be enclosed for winter use, the picnic shelter is confusable with what it has been chosen to term herein community buildings and recreation buildings. If space for a concession is incorporated in the plan, it is difficult to determine at what stage the shelter actually attains the status of concession building or refectory. When there is elaboration of equipment to include sinks and counters, and facilities for cooking more in the nature of stoves than mere open fireplaces, it is customary to designate the shelter a picnic kitchen or kitchen shelter.

This latter well-defined variant of the picnic shelter seems to have originated in the Northwest, where heavy rainfall is presumably an abnormal threat to cooking picnic fare in the open. The type evolved is a kind of picnic shelter in which many of the material benefits of the home kitchen one has fled from are provided. Usually the side walls are widely open except against the prevailing winds. Our countrymen of this region must fairly radiate sweetness and light, for here quite generally the facilities for cooking are double, triple, or quadruple ovens ranged in close proximity about one chimney. The shelters bear no noticeable scars of intergroup ruction and seem almost to refute the widely held conviction that close contact of picnicking groups is provocative of trouble. Perhaps from this peaceable region will spread forth the millennium when the lion and the lamb universally can picnic on the same half-acre and like it.

There are colloquial departures in shelters, their treatment, and their functions which make for other well-defined varieties. Typical of the Southwest is the ramada, functioning in protection of one or more groups of picnickers from the heat and brilliance of the desert sun. Its name is from the Spanish, its style generally derived from the Pueblo. It is built with rock or adobe walls or piers, its practically flat roof carried on round poles, or vigas. Its roof is usually covered with a kind of thatch allowed to hang down over the edges as a fringed protective valance of bewhiskered appearance. The ramada of the desert country is often equipped with an integral open fireplace with chimney. Sometimes there is provided instead a nearby outdoor fireplace for the preparation of food.

There are some oft-repeated plan arrangements of shelters which amount almost to standardization. One such typical arrangement, having a fireplace centered on one end wall, is quite open except that the chimney end wall and adjacent stretches of abutting side walls, for one-fifth to one-third their length, are built solid. Another recognizable type has similar chimney and enclosed treatment at both ends and side walls of open construction between. Both these types have been built far and wide to serve basic practical needs which do not vary greatly for reasons of locale. Almost identical plans may be outwardly clothed to have highly individual regional character.

In their structural elements there is often almost no appreciable difference between some picnic shelters and some trailside shelters, especially the simpler expressions of both. Differentiation between them is largely a matter of location and manner of use.

There are logical combinations of the picnic shelter with other park structural needs which diversify its form and appearance. Custodian's or concessionaire s quarters, concession space, public comfort stations, and storage space have been successfully incorporated with shelters and have produced satisfying variations which avoid the commonplace on the one hand and the fantastic on the other. There are sufficient legitimate combinations and cross-combinations of functions, materials, forms, and other ingredients to make possible an almost infinite number of agreeably different structures, if served up without economy of skill and effort in the contriving and seasoned with a palatable dash of individuality.

Unless it is a pavement of end grain blocks, a wood floor for a shelter has little to recommend it. Better that it be simply a gravel or earth fill, or brick or stone laid on a sand fill. One of several surface materials such as flagstone, brick, slate, and tile laid on a concrete base will give a more durable floor. The variety of soil and frost conditions over the entire country precludes the making of any more definite recommendation of base or surface materials, or depth of enclosing frost wall. Extent of funds and local availability of material also will affect selection of the surface treatment.

Whatever material a thorough consideration of circumstances may designate for use, it is certainly to be urged that intelligent thought be given to the factors of frost wall, base material, and method of laying with respect to durability of the finished product. So many pavements of open shelters have failed to survive the local temperature range and frost action, with such disheartening results, that it is not unfair to assert that there has been too prevalent ignorance or naive disregard of unchangeable facts of Nature. Were it not for the introductory promise to avoid the "primer" approach within these discussions, there would be at this point a yielding to temptation to point out that masonry expands under heat and contracts with cold, and that proper expansion joints are a specific, that foundation walls are unreliable unless carried below the local frost level, and that bounding retaining walls do not long retain if moisture can collect underground above the frost line. A promise being what it is, a recall of these elementary facts must go herein unrecorded and neglected.

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